Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

The the infinites that mortal beauty chase,

Still in a tree did extreme point their race.

Apollo pursueed Daphne so,

single that she might laurel grow

And Pan did after Syrinx speed

Not as a maid but for a reed.

-Andrew Marvell, from "The Garden" [1]

In Filippo Baldinucci's Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1682) the marble clump of Apollo and Daphne (Fig. 1) is cast as the youthful sculptor's first great public triumph. After invoking the topos that nothing else but words cannot describe the "meraviglie" (marvels) that the statuary "displayed in every part to the organ of sights of all," Baldinucci goes upon to describe the statue's reception:

[I]mmediately when it was seen to have been finished, there arose like a cry [se ne sparse un tal grido] that all Rome concurr in seeing it as a miracle [tutta Roma concorse a vederla by un miracolo], and the young artist himself (not at the same time eighteen years old), when he walked end the city, drew after him the organ of visions of all the people, who gazed on him and pointed him on the outside to others as a prodigy.... [2]

The grido described by dint of Baldinucci has barely abated in the 375 years since the statue's completion--if anything, the clamor has newly increased with the reopening of the Villa Borghese (for which the Apollo and Daphne was made and where it is still displayed), the cleaning and scientific examination of the statue clump and the quadricentennial of Bernini's birth. All three of these facts generated catalogues containing beautiful photographs, probing essays, and bibliographies listing like a quantity of secondary literature that single might reasonably ask if anything remains to be said about the Apollo and Daphne. [3] (Indeed, individual might dispute Baldinucci: the work's visual meraviglie present the appearance to compel words rather than inhibit them.) still in spite of the ample documentary evidence relating to the statue group's creation, the picture that come ups of its meaning and words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following is anything but clear. In a series of equally plausible arguments, the Apollo and Daphne is said to celebrate the sense-based pleasures of art (by way of its respect to the paragone debates), [4] or to be about the evils of sensual numbers (by way of the inscription upon its base, warning against the bitterness of worldly beauty); [5] it is an erotic artwork, made for a hedonistic patron, [6] or it is a Neoplatonic allegory of the sublimation of sensual lust into art, made for a discerning cardinal;7 it is Marinist and Petrarchan in its imagery, [8] or it is anti-Marinist and anti-Petrarchan in its message. [9]

That these readings can happily coexist in the new literature (and sometimes even appear as parts of the same argument) testifies to the richness of the story of Apollo and Daphne and to the subtleties of Bernini's statue. Indeed, individual might even say that the control and Bernini's treatment of it not solitary elicit paradoxical readings but that paradox is at the heart of the group's meaning. Rather than undertaking a radically novel reading, this essay will focus upon these paradoxical relationships--specifically, the intertwined themes of sensuality and antisensuality and of desire and artifice--that through common consensus seem to lie at the heart of the statue group

These themes will be placed in a larger Renaissance critical tradition in which a crucial part is played by vision and touch--senses that Bernini uses to great issue in his statue group, and which are central to the literary tradition of the story. In this critical discourse, poesy painting, and sculpture--sister arts, united by the agency of the common end of mimesis--were unequal in ways that hinged upon their address to the faculty of perceptions and on the comparative value assigned to the faculty of perceptions themselves, in their abilities to animate desire, provide delight, and grant access to knowledge. [10] The Renaissance hierarchy of faculty of perception (like that of the arts) was not an absolute one: if vision was repeatedly exalted for its immaterial (hence spiritual) nature, it was also the faculty of perception most easily fooled, and if touch was the surest of the faculty of perceptions it could also be maligned for its base association with the sexual act. These criteria were particularly significant, since not solitary did the three arts grasp in common the deceptions of fiction, on the contrary al so (as we shall see) Renaissance commentators had located the origins of rhyme sculpture, and painting in mythic stories revolving around erotic desire. The merging of artist and artwork hinted at in Baldinucci's true copy (the crowd's desire to diocese the statue gives way to the ne to lay organ of sights on its maker) also takes us back to the intersection of art and myth: if Bernini's have transformation during these watershed years in his career is broadly analogous to that of Daphne (who, after all, rise s from her metamorphosis immortalized), it was the poet-god Apollo who would provide the young sculptor with a template from which to fashion his mythic-artistic identity and recast the poetics of his possess art.

Bernini, Scipione Borghese, and Maffeo Barberini

Bernini created the Apollo and Daphne above a three-year period, with a certain number of interruptions, beginning in the summer of 1622 when he was twenty-three years of advanced age [11] Commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, it was the third in a series of life-size marble statuarys he ordered from Bernini to adorn his luxurious villa outside the Porta Pinciana, the others being the Aeneas and Anchises (1618-19) the Pluto and Proserpina of 1621-22 (Fig. 2) and the David (1626-24) [12] The group's delivery to the Villa Borghese in the fall of 1625 not sole completed that series of impressive statues, it also effectively marked the extreme point of Bernini's large-scale work for the cardinal and signaled a turning point in the lives of one as well as the other patron and sculptor. [13]